18 Feb
1997
18 Feb
'97
11:17 p.m.
Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on:
THEORY OF MIND IN NONHUMAN PRIMATES
by C. M. Heyes
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please send EMAIL to:
bbs(a)cogsci.soton.ac.uk
or write to:
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Department of Psychology
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/
ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/
gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals
If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators
are eligible to become BBS Associates.
To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the
instructions that follow after the abstract.
____________________________________________________________________
THEORY OF MIND IN NONHUMAN PRIMATES
C. M. Heyes
Department of Psychology
University College London
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom
c.heyes(a)ucl.ac.uk
KEYWORDS: apes; associative learning; concepts; convergence;
deception; evolution of intelligence; folk psychology;
imitation; mental state attribution; monkeys; parsimony;
perspective-taking; primates; role-taking; self-recognition;
social cognition; social intelligence; theory of mind.
ABSTRACT: Since the BBS article in which Premack & Woodruff
(1978) asked "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?", it
has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and
experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts,
such as `want' and `know'. Unlike in research on the
development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no
substantial progress has been made through this work with
nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of imitation,
self-recognition, social relationships, deception, role-taking
and perspective-taking suggests that in every case where
nonhuman primate behavior has been interpreted as a sign of
theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by chance or as
a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative
learning or inferences based on nonmental categories.
Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of
mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more
parsimonious than alternatives, or because it is supported by
convergent evidence, are not compelling. Such arguments are
based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimony
in science, and either ignore the requirement that convergent
evidence proceed from independent assumptions, or fail to show
that it supports the theory of mind hypothesis over
nonmentalist alternatives. Progress in research on theory of
mind requires experimental procedures that can distinguish the
theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alternatives. A
procedure that may have this potential is proposed. It uses
conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to
determine whether chimpanzees have the concept `see'.
Commentators are invited to identify flaws in the procedure and
to suggest alternatives.
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To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web or by anonymous ftp or gopher from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.
The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.heyes.html
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.heyes
ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.heyes
gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals
To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either:
ftp ftp.princeton.edu
or
ftp 128.112.128.1
When you are asked for your login, type:
anonymous
Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid:
yourlogin(a)yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@")
cd /pub/harnad/BBS
To show the available files, type:
ls
Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example):
get bbs.heyes
When you have the file(s) you want, type:
quit